Can Lotus survive its latest crisis?

The news has broken that many insiders already feared: Geely is considering closing Lotus’s Hethel factory. Countless rounds of job losses over the last two years, stop-start production of the Emira due to parts supply issue (the suggestion is that Lotus Cars hasn’t had the cash to pay for them) and the spectacular and financial failure of the Evija has resulted in owners Geely leaving nothing off the table when it comes to deciding the fate of the storied British manufacturer.

Since the original story broke via the Financial Times on Friday evening, Lotus has issued a statement on Saturday saying: “Lotus Cars is continuing normal operations, there are no plans to close any factory.” It has the reassurance of the chairman of a football club backing their manager after a string of defeats. Before inevitably sacking them a week later. 

That the design and engineering teams are little more than a skeleton staff and the production line is barely running suggests that clearly all is not well at Hethel. Some sources even suggest the issue for Geely goes beyond Lotus Cars, with Volvo and Polestar facing increasing market pressures.

Under Geely ownership Hethel was to be the home of Lotus sports cars, with its Wuhan factory responsible for the company’s electric cars, the Eletre and Emeya. 

Investment wasn’t in short supply. A new production hall and all the ancillaries were built for the battery-powered Evija hypercar. When Elise, Evora and Exige finally came to an end the site was overhauled, another new production hall built and the Lotus Emira was born. They even laid new Tarmac in the car park. Hethel was finally fit for 21st-century car production. Unfortunately, it seems Lotus wasn’t.

The Emira launched to great fanfare. Jenson Button pulled the covers off, people queued at the Lotus stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed to place deposits. It looked sensational. It would be affordable - £85,000 for the V6, circa £60-65,000 for the 4-cylinder AMG engines version. Look out Porsche!

Lotus had a car people wanted. The question now would be: could Hethel keep up with demand? Of course it could, but sadly not because of the sizeable production capacity available in the new start of the art facility it was being built in. Rather, Lotus was struggling to build what is, when broken down to its constituent parts, a rebodied Evora with a new interior. 

Customers grew tired of waiting, more grew tired of the shocking service from Lotus. What started as a buying experience that made depositors feel like Kings and Queens quickly became a customer service mess. Emails and phone calls went unanswered, dealers had no more insight than customers so, understandably deposits were pulled. The Emira was late. And around £10,000 more expensive than Lotus said it would be.

When it did arrive it still wasn’t quite ready. The first test cars handed over to the press in 2022 came with a sheet of A4 paper highlighting any discrepancies each test car might have due to them being ‘early production cars’. The V6 evo was sent had the optional Sport chassis but the lower spec Goodyear tyres of a car with a Tour chassis. 

The ABS and stability control systems were also ‘not optimised’ and we were asked ‘please don’t crash it because we’re not sure the airbags work and take a 10mm spanner with you in case you need to disconnect the battery to turn it off and on again’. And when we track tested it at Anglesey they could only provide part-worn tyres as spares. No wonder the lad sent to come and fix the car when it stopped working arrived in his own Cayman rather than a spare Emira: “I needed to get here.”

> Lotus has launched a new flagship Emira, and it starts from almost £100k

Three years and a month to when we last drove an Emira V6, we’ve driven another (you can read about it in the August issue of evo available Wednesday July 9), and while there was no requirement to bring our own tool kit, it still felt unfinished. 

The four-cylinder AMG engine Emira felt like a much better, more resolved car. It lacked the noise and theatre of the Toyota V6 and the manual gearbox, but the turbocharged four and paddleshift gearbox suited the car so much better. It was late to market, too. We drove one and really liked it, to the extent that it felt it would give an Alpine A110 more of a challenge than a Porsche Cayman. We’ve still not been able to prove this because as soon as it was launched the four-cylinder cars pretty much disappeared. The Mercedes engine Lotus was working with had gone out of certification and it would have to wait until the updated unit was available. 

Now it is and the four-cylinder Emiras to which it’ll be fitted will be called the Turbo and SE. I genuinely hope we’re able to test it and customers buy it. The Emira is a good car. Class beater? Not quite, but both the Cayman and A110 are remarkable and as a trio they offer three bespoke personalities on a sports car. 

The Evija, on the other hand, should never have left the ideation meeting. Whatever was Lotus thinking? That a company known for lightweight, compact sport cars that borrowed engines from humble manufacturers to power their sensational sports cars could build a seven-figure priced hypercar. This wasn’t what it needed. Not then. Not ever. These £2m, 2000bhp cars are follies. Wreckless corporate vanity projects that do irreversible damage. When Porsche quietly sidelines its offering, Mission X, you know there’s no market for them.

> A hybrid Lotus Emira could be on the cards

The possibility that Hethel might now close and with it take 1300 jobs out of the local economy is sadly easy to understand when you take emotion out of the equation and look at the numbers. In the first quarter of 2025 Lotus delivered 555 sports cars, a 52 percent drop on the year before. 

For the full year 2024 Lotus delivered 5,272 cars with North America deliveries finally starting, but that bubble appears to have already popped. Factor in the barren start to quarter two due to America's to and fro on tariffs and even if our friends across the Atlantic went into overdrive, Emira sales for 2025 are going to be around half the number of the previous year.

Hethel can’t survive on such low volumes. Then again, neither could a rumoured US factory, even if it also took on Eletre and Emeya production and whatever they call the reverse-engineered plug-in hybrid models based on its two battery electric vehicles. The Lotus ship has sailed, and there are no cars on it. 

Geely buying Lotus was never going to transform it into Porsche, but it should have provided it with a strong foundation to be the best at what it does best – engineering and building innovative cars and schooling the best engineers along the way. Lotus is a specialist. It should have been the opportunity to blend the alchemy of Lotus Engineering with the intuition of Lotus Cars to create low volume products customers would pay a high price for. 

In the latter years there have been far too many middle-aged men on the Lotus payroll wearing oversized glow-white trainers, spending more time signing leases on city centre vanity showrooms than understanding the business they are paid handsomely to operate in. Lotus has always sailed too close to the wind, but it seems the storm has finally taken out Hethel.